Sweeps Guarantee Nothing in October

The Phillies learned in recent years that a Champagne toast celebrating a playoff sweep often is a team’s last of the season.

The New York Yankees wrapped up their first-round series against the Minnesota Twins in three games on Saturday, giving the defending World Series champs five full days of rest before the ALCS starts Friday. And the defending NL champion Phillies finished off the Reds in three games on Sunday, which gives them the same amount of rest. Both teams can reset their rotations and rest injured players while waiting for the remaining four playoff teams to finish off the other two division series. The Yankees’ opponent will have two days off, and the Phillies’ opponent will have as little as two if the Braves beat the Giants at home on Monday night.

There are several reasons to think that their first-round sweeps make the Yankees and Phillies big favorites in the upcoming league championship series. Their dominance suggests the teams are peaking at the right time and will carry their top form into the next round. Or, looked at another way, the teams’ sweeps are indicators that they have superior talent to their next opponents, who will need at least four games to advance. Also, the rest will help them get the most out of their pitchers in the next round.

But recent history suggests that rest is vastly overrated. There have been 18 league championship series pitting one team that swept its divisional series and one that didn’t. (The divisional round made a one-year appearance in strike-shortened 1981, and has been a permanent fixture since 1995.) And in those 18 series, the team that swept its prior series won just one-third of the time — six series.

The Phillies and Yankees both have reason to know that their sweeps mean little. In each of the last two Octobers, Philadelphia was facing a Dodgers team that had swept its divisional series. And each time the Phillies won in five games. Meanwhile, the Yankees advanced to the World Series in 2000 and 1981 by winning the ALCS against teams that had swept their prior opponent.

The same trend holds in the World Series. Twelve times the Fall Classic has been contested by one team that swept the league championship series, against an opponent that dropped at least one game in its prior series. And seven times the team coming off the sweep lost — including the last two times this has happened, in 2006 and 2007. In those years, the Cardinals and Red Sox, respectively, were coming off tough seven-game series. Despite having so much less rest than their opponents, they dropped just one game, combined, in the World Series. (Sweeps don’t always bode well for NBA teams, either.)

Some of the better-rested teams that lost fell to superior opponents. If you’d used won-loss record to pick the 18 league championship series where only one team had swept its earlier series, you’d have picked eight correctly and nine wrong (in one, both teams had the same number of wins). Or if you went with the Simple Rating System (SRS), which takes into account run differential and schedule strength, you’d have been right 10 times — slightly better than a coin flip. So that might encourage the Phillies, since they’re better by either measure than each of their possible opponents. But in the World Series, these other measures — substituting run differential for SRS when it wasn’t calculable — have been even worse than choosing the better-rested team: Each picks the winner right just four of 12 times.

Comments (1 of 1)

Insightful analysis. The concept of a sweep adds interesting dimension to baseball play. I am trying to introduce a new statistics called "Sweep Factor" which is a ratio of sweep and being swept. check my blog seriesweep.blogspot.com

SPORTS, THE JOURNAL WAY

Be sure to check your Daily Fix all week long. The Fix's daily rundown of the best sportswriting on the Web is joined by features such as The Count, a look at the most revealing sports stats, as well as regular live reports of major sports events. Tell us what you think of the Fix at dailyfixlinks@gmail.com.